arndt@lymph.DEC (12/06/84)
Hey Rich, bite this: "Scientists as a class are rationalists, at least in the limited sense of believing without qualification in the NECESSITY of reason. Rationalism carries with it a professional obligation to combat the modern taste for irrationalism - not just spoon-bending or its philosophic equivalents, but the inclination to substitute "rhapsodic" intellection for the humdrum ratiocination that has satisified all the world's great thinkers hitherto. Among the principal antiscientific movements are the cult of the wisdom of the East and of mystical theology . . . . Young scientists must however never be tempted into mistaking the necessity of reason for the sufficiency of reason. Rationalism falls short of answering the many simple and childlike questions people like to ask: questions about origins and purposes such as are often contemptuously dismissed as nonquestions or pseudoquestions, although people understand them clearly enough and long to have answers. These are intellectual pains that rationalists - like bad physicians confronted by aliments they cannot diagnose or cure - are apt to dismiss as "imagination." It is not to rationalism that we look for answers to these simple questions because rationalism chides the endeavor to look at all." (P.B. Medawar [wasn't he the third baseman . . .] ADVISE TO A YOUNG SCIENTIST, Harper, 1979,p.101. ---------------------- Is this a fair picture of the line that divides you and the gang? Keep chargin' Ken Arndt